


tangentially

by MintyCel



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Eventual Smut, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Force Ghost(s), Happy Ending, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Redeemed Ben Solo, Rey (Star Wars) is Nobody, Self-Discovery, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:00:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22609678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MintyCel/pseuds/MintyCel
Summary: After Exegol Rey goes through a period of deep mourning, escaping to the crowded towns of Corellia where no one knows who she is whenever she needs some time by herself. But one day, a stranger walks into the dingy bar where Rey is drinking some of her sadness away, a stranger that seems all too familiar and is wearing Ben Solo's face.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16
Collections: For one is both and both are one in love: The Reylo Fanfiction Anthology's Valentine's Day Exchange





	tangentially

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ninecrimes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninecrimes/gifts).



> This is responding to ninecrime's prompt: Rey finds Ben in a bar somewhere in the galaxy with no memory of her.   
> I am sorry I wasn't able to include the A/B/O aspect you wanted, it just wasn't working with the story I was writing. But I hope you like it nonetheless, I had a lot of fun writing it. 
> 
> Rey is not Palpatine's granddaughter but everything else happened exactly as it did in TRoS.

It is the nature of living beings, Rey knows, to die. 

The womp rat hides away in the depths of Beggar’s Canon when it feels the end coming. The Bantha lay over on their sides, moaning to the rest of their herd until the end. Droids know the end is near when wires rust beyond repair and processors damage without chance of recovery.

Sentient beings are bad at dying. They fight back tooth and nail when the end approaches. Yet they welcome death with an intensity rivaled only by emotions that Rey wouldn't have known truly existed if she hadn’t experienced them in the flesh: familiarity, hope, love.

Rey had witnessed this foolish endeavor in the past; the Teedo giving up their bodies to the powerful sands of their Goddess R'iia when there was no choice but to hunt for food in the middle of a storm. Han Solo stepping in front of a glowing red saber knowing that looking into his son's face meant doing so for the last time. Luke Skywalker gave up his essence to the force to give the Resistance precious time they did not have. And now Ben… Ben Solo saves her life.

A circle, a vicious circle of death and love grotesquely entwined together. Like two puzzle pieces that should never fit.

She loves him tangentially. In spite of his mortality.

~

His body never grows cold before the force takes him, sorrow washes over her like a wave that crashes at the shore of some unsuspecting calm beach on a planet she has never visited.

Rey returns to the resistance, her fingers clutching the lightsaber that finally called him worthy in one of her hands, and the other grips the hilt of Leia's forgotten saber, a metaphor she thinks for this whole thing. Everyone forgot Ben Solo except his mother, and yet it had been him who saved her, who had talked to her and seen her for who she was, even when the allure of the dark side was pulling him apart. 

Finn clutches her tightly to his chest, and other emotions place a momentary lock on her grief: relief, happiness, nostalgia. Her friends are alive, the resistance although dwindled is not gone completely. She hugs them like her life depended on it and perhaps it does for the moment; they are her only lifeline, her only tie to reality.

When they have a quiet moment Rey tells them what Ben Solo did. She tells them of his bravery and his sacrifice, of how he crawled himself out of a pit abandoned by all of those in the force that had claimed to love him and want to protect him, and how he still saved her life.   
Poe listens with unease in his eyes but he blessedly does not say what Rey knows in his mind, that Kylo Ren tortured him, that he was responsible for the suffering of millions across the galaxy; Rey already knows these things.

Finn on the other hand listens with rapture, with a mix of understanding and relief in his eyes. Rey can tell he is glad Kylo Ren is dead, but he is also glad that she is alive and that Ben Solo was the catalyst for her survival. Better than most Finn knows what it’s like to have to change yourself, and Rey muses that he can probably understand that from Ben if nothing else. 

~

The days after that first one becomes harder to navigate, the grief tugs at her like a caged animal, clawing and biting at her insides until she is shaking from the unshed tears and the unsaid words. So she gets busy, at first Poe needs her help with everything, his leadership is not strong enough to bring a whole galaxy together, and even with Leia's blessing upon his position as Commander, Poe does not want it. Finn takes over a lot of the bureaucratic responsibility, deals with governments and treaties, and sketches the foundations of a new republic based on what everyone has told him of the Old Republic. It will take time to dismantle the effects of First Order rule over the Galaxy, even before a new formed Republic is a thought in their minds. 

For her part, Rey spends her days training and reading. She picks and chooses Jedi ideology from Luke's Jedi texts, and she gains access to Sith books from 3PO's database and from some of the planets that have opened their archives and libraries to the last self professed Jedi.   
It is this hole in her chest that brings her back to the same dingy hole of a bar in Tralus. She doesn't drink, not exactly. She buys one tonic, strong enough to knock over a man with half of her force power, but she nurses that same drink over the span of hours.

Sometimes she sits at a table by herself, her fingers making coins float one by one between her fingers, or having them spin over the table in an endless loop. And she lets herself think, not cry, never cry, but think. Sometimes about Ben, other times about her parents, and yet others about Palpatine and the claw shaped mark he had left in her very soul when he'd taken the force of their bond with him. Rey wishes he had destroyed it in the very act, instead he left a gaping hole, one that could have mended if Ben had lived, but that had only grown wider and wider as the days without him passed. 

When she thinks of her parents too much her rage mounts, that same anger that had made Luke as wary of her as he'd been of his own nephew. On those days the bar always ends with a fight, and Rey comes back to the Resistance base with bruises she can't explain to Finn's worried face or Poe's lingering frown. 

Rey knows that she should tell them about Palpatine. But the shame in her burns hot and she can almost see the looks of horrified surprise in their faces if they found out that she almost willingly gave her body to him, that she was instrumental in his return to power. 

~

The first time she sees him, she has already downed half of her tonic and there are five coins spinning on her table when the doors to the bar open with a strong creak, as if whoever is on the other side does not quite know how strong they are. 

Whoever comes in is dressed in a cloak that hides their hair and half of their face. That's normal for a holw in the wall as this one, where mercenaries and former First Order officers on the run need to keep their identities secret. 

There is a tingle inside her soul, right where her bond with Ben used to be, where the gaping of hole now sits. 

At first Rey pays it no mind, she tends to ignore everyone until it comes down to a fight. But something tugs at her insides and after another hour of sipping her drink, it becomes impossible to ignore.

She stands up from the table and drinks the remaining of her tonic in one long swipe. 

She approaches the bar with the same kind of unbidden recklessness that she used to have as a scavenger in Jakku. You jump first and figure out how to get out of the Star Destroyer later. 

She approaches the cloaked figure in the bar, and the tug only grows stronger, like a hand slipping inside her chest and pulling at her veins. She can't breathe, behind her eyes she sees stars and a darkness so black it rivals the darkest sky she has ever seen.

_Rey._

Everyone has turned around to look at her. The Twi’lek barkeeper and the handful of customers still drinking and playing cards at their tables, all looking at her. Rey blinks and notices that the cloaked man is also turned towards her, and he's looking straight at her.

If she'd been having difficulty breathing before, now the air has been completely knocked out of her lungs.

The cloaked man looks at her with Ben Solo's eyes, with his face, his nose and his lips. 

For a long terrible second Rey thinks this is her mind playing tricks on her, surely a horrible hallucination, a perversion of the force meant to shake her up. But when she blinks, he's still there, and he is getting up from his chair and approaching her with concern on his face. His voice, Ben Solo's voice asks her if she is okay. 

The last thing Rey sees before she's running out of the bar like a desperate woman is Ben's eyes, the same ones that had looked at her everytime Kylo Ren removed his mask. But those same eyes did not know her.

Rey goes back to the resistance that day, she doesn't sleep, she doesn't eat, she goes straight to her bunk and for the first time breaks down into big untethered sobs. 

When she finally cries herself to a couple hours of fitful sleep, the only thing she sees is him, and in her deepest of hearts she knows that she just let him go again. 

~

Three days.

That’s how long it takes her to break her own promise of not going back there. 

Three days of nightmares, of snapping at Finn and Poe and Rose until they opted to leave her alone as she clearly wanted. Three days of eating on autopilot even though her appetite is gone, she still doesn’t waste food even if she knows it will be there the next day. 

She cries more in these three days than in the months following the events at Exegol and it shows, there are bags under her eyes and once or twice Finn and Rose catch her with a tear stained face that betrays her. Finn always tries to ask her what is wrong but he wears the face of resignation that knows Rey won't tell him and she prefers to bare it alone. She doesn't not really, she thinks that if one of them asked, she would probably tell them and subject herself to their doubts and moralistic conclusions. But it is so second nature to be alone, to keep what she is feeling to herself like she did for so long. 

_Until Ben_ , her mind supplies, but Rey shuts the thought so quickly it feels like a door slamming down inside her mind.

When she arrives at Tralus, she stays in the cockpit of the falcon for what seems like ages but could not be more than half hour, convincing herself to move, to either go to the bar and look for him again, demand answers. Or to go back home and forget the whole thing, convince herself that she was probably hallucinating or seeing something that she purposely wanted to see due to the grief. 

Finally she reaches for her cloak and slides it over her head and her face. She has never bothered to go undercover before, but this time it feels important to not be seen looking for him, as if she's keeping a secret that's too precious or too dangerous to let out. Perhaps it's both. Perhaps she just doesn't want him to see her first, if he even exists. 

When she pushes the door of the bar open, her traitorous eyes go to the same spot he had been in before, but this time is empty. She sucks in a painful breath like scalding ice in her lungs, and tries so hard to not let disappointment take over her.

She takes the ten steps that separates her from the bar and orders her usual. For a moment she considers asking the bar keeper if he knows who he was, and if he has been here since that day. Part of her mind, the dark ugly and twisted thing even considers making him tell her what he knows. But she reigns herself in, and instead takes her usual spot in one of the tables by the wall where the bar is visible. She doesn't drop her hood and keeps her face low as she watches or waits for the same tug in the force to call to her. 

That day Rey goes home empty handed, with the throbbing inside her sharper than usual, and a new in her heart that she hadn't recognized for what it was: _hope_.

~

The second time she sees him, fear strikes her down on the spot.

He's different this time, his hands are stained with engine oil and ship fuel. Underneath his cloak he's wearing a tattered mechanic outfit that she can barely get a glimpse of as he walks towards the bar. 

The temperature around her seems to rise, or perhaps it is within her, she isn't sure. She becomes clumsy, the coins that she has been carefully balancing with her hands using the force won't stay in the air again. 

And inside her, it hurts. Right where the hole in her soul is, it becomes more and more uncomfortable the more minutes pass and he's right there.

_Coward._

That is what her own mind calls her as she grabs her own cloak and all but runs out of the bar. 

She never makes it back to the Resistance that night, instead she takes the falcon to Jakku, to the middle of the desert, and takes a lightsaber out from her belt. She doesn't know which one it is, if it is Luke's or Leia's or even her freshly made one. 

She strikes a pile of scrap metal and star destroyer parts. They fall to the sand in a mess of melting pieces and broken wires. When that pile is completely destroyed, she moves on to the next, and the next. Her wrist hurts at one point, and there is a wound on her arm at another, but she pays these things no mind, instead indulging on the pleasure of destruction, of undoing something that was there before but it is not any longer.

She feels powerful and in control for that precious night. But when she climbs the falcon early the next morning, she also knows she's never been closer to the darkside.

~

She's there the next day, and the next, and the day after that. But she doesn't feel anything or see anyone for weeks

Eventually, her escapades space out, one day she goes and sits at the bar, another day she spends her time searching the galaxy for answers. Though she doesn't quite know the questions.

What does it mean to be a Jedi? Does she want them back just like they were before? She wouldn't be responsible for stealing children from their families. But she still searched the galaxy for those left by the sidelines, the undesirables, and street rats, the scavengers like she had been. 

For those who are force sensitive she poses a question, would they like to learn to control the force? And use it for the good of the galaxy? 

Some are eager to follow her, and Rey promises to let them visit whatever place they left, others refuse to look back to where they come from, and yet others refuse her outright. Rey never forces them. 

She pours herself into this work and almost forgets about Tralus, about the bar, about him. 

Almost.

~

And then he appears to her again. Like an apparition, just to haunt her. And perhaps he has every right to, his death is partly her fault isn't it?

He's sitting at the bar, a glass of something dark in his hand. His hood is covering his head and part of his face, but Rey doesn't need to see him to know that it's him. She can feel it again inside her, the way she starts feeling the gap their bond left, but not quite, as if the piece of the puzzle is in the wrong place.

This time she doesn't even pretend to not see him, it's been enough time, she thinks. Weeks of preparation for this moment. So she walks straight to the bar and sits right next to him, startling the bar keeper who always sees her sit at the back at one of her usual tables. 

She doesn't order her usual, instead she just turns to look at him. Like a ticking clock, something inside him gives.

"Who are you?" He says, and his voice is raspy with misuse, she thinks. 

The words still feel like a punch to the gut. Rey had a feeling that he didn't remember her because there had been total emptiness in his eyes that first time she'd seen him, as if he'd been hollowed out and emptied. 

Tears sting at the corners of her eyes but she doesn't let them fall, not yet.

"I'm Rey." She says, and is surprised by the lack of tremor in her voice, "What about you? What is your name?" 

His mouth opens as if to answer, but a moment of complete confusion crosses his face, like a shadow.

"I am not sure." He says, but there is a frown between his brows that tells her he knows how ridiculous that sounds, not knowing what your own name is. So he is aware that there is something wrong, even if he can’t quite name what that is. So she tries a different approach, something that perhaps he can answer.

"Why are you here?" 

This time there is no doubt in his face when he answers, and the words come out of his mouth with the certainty of Kylo Ren. "A feeling, this place... it was calling me."

She knows because she knows that feeling. It's probably the force inside of him that felt her frequenting this place and bringing him back to her. 

"And then you..." he continues, snapping Rey's attention back, "I am not sure how to explain it." This time he sounds less sure of himself and Rey makes herself smile softly, past the stab of pain she feels in her heart.

"It's alright. Do you know where you were before you came to this planet?" Perhaps that would give her a clue as to what happened to him after Exegol. 

He nods sagely, as if the answer must be obvious, eyes cloudy as if taken over by a vision or a memory she cannot conjure. "There was a woman," he says, "I knew her from somewhere… She said I shouldn’t be there."

And then as if realizing something, his head turns sharply to look at her. "Why are you here? You are always here, everytime I come. Are you following me?" 

Her eyes avert guiltily to the side and for a moment Rey considers spilling everything out. Their past, and their kiss, and the death of his family. But she can’t bring herself to do it, not yet. Instead, she settles for a half truth, “I felt it too.” she says, an echo of words he said to her what now seems like eons ago. “The pull towards this place, to you.”

He looks like he wants to protest but in the end it is clear that he doesn’t have enough information to do anything of the sort, and Rey feels a stab of guilt at the relief that she doesn’t have to explain anything just yet. 

“Where did you go?” She asks instead, “When you weren’t on this planet.”

“Naboo.” He says, “It pulled me too, just like this place. But here, I knew I was looking for you. Over there…” He shrugs, “I didn’t know what I was supposed to find.”

“Where did you get the ship? How did you eat? Were you stealing?” The questions come out of her like rapid fire before she can stop them and he raises both hands in defense.

“I worked as a mechanic. I woke up there, the first time on Naboo, and I knew what to do with my hands, I knew how to repair things. I don’t know how, but I knew.”

That makes her stop and look at him, and she can feel the tears welling up in her eyes again. She remembers the mechanic uniform he had been wearing the last time he saw her. Of course he knows how to repair ships with who his father was, not even Snoke could beat that out of him. 

Before she can say something else Rey decides they’ve had enough. She finishes her drink with one quick gulp and stands up from her chair, tossing a couple of coins to the barkeeper to cover both her and Ben’s drink, then motions for him to follow her outside. 

“I think,” she says, once they are standing outside the falcon and Ben is looking at her helplessly, with an expression of confusion but also curiosity, “That you should come with me. We were drawn to each other for a reason, and maybe I can help you regain the time you lost, and your memories.”

He thinks this over for a moment, and for one split of a second Rey thinks he’s going to refuse, that he’s going to give some excuse about his mechanic job in Naboo, or the ship that brought him here. Instead, he shrugs, “I don’t have anything with me, but I can earn my keep fixing ships.” He says.

Rey smiles, a genuine smile this time, though nothing can quite erase the pain she’s still reeling with. “I’m sure we can find something for you to do.”

~

He sits at the falcon seat with a look of quiet contemplation in his eyes, something he would later blame on dejavu when Rey prods him from an answer. 

She imagines him as a young boy, with toys scattered at the feet of the pilot’s chair, Han’s hand carding through his soft hair, Leia smiling at both of them. Her heart aches, and she turns her attention before he can see the change in her.

_You know this place_ , she wants to say, _you grew up here_.

But she bites her tongue and lets him take the co-pilot seat back to base.


End file.
